John Ward David Cameron circle of friends, Uncategorized

SATURDAY SKETCH: Mr Cameron, be careful what you wish for

Nothing beats a good bashing.

Coulson….a man with his ear to the phone

David Cameron keeps on telling us to stop bashing bankers, but there are two problems with his pleas. The first and obvious one is that, in everything they do and say, senior investment bankers behave as if they are wired – in the same way as other forms of plant life display shape and colour for bees – to attract bashing. Bob Diamond, for example, has the sort of smirk you’d like to remove with a cricket bat.

The second point however – and I think I should get paid for this insight – is that the Prime Minister has offered nothing in the way of guidance as to whom we should bash, if bankers are to be declared hors de combat and generally off-limits. And I’m pretty sure I know why this is.

You see, being supportive of – nay, beholden to – so many sorts of people you’d love to bash, Dave needs to be wary of creating a major step-change in the epidemiology of bashing. If he’s not careful, there could very easily be a pandemic of punching, a  tournament of ear-boxing, or a thumping great beatathon.

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For example, I’m sure that even those people with Sky dishes on their domiciles would queue for days just to hit Rupert Murdoch. Me, I’d have a season ticket. Offer everyone the chance to land a punch on the dodgy Digger for ten quid, and Britain’s deficit problems would very quickly be at an end. As indeed would Rupert.

Then there’s Andy Coulson, a man who can’t help being that kid we all knew at school. You know, the one who smoked in front of the bike sheds rather than behind. The one who always knew his rights. The  one that even the most mild-mannered teacher always secretly wanted to thrash. “Who, me sir? Not me sir. No sir, that wasn’t a fag you saw in my ‘and sir, that was a piece of chalk. And you can’t get me anyway sir, else my big bruvver’ll ‘it yer”. Yes, that one.

There used to be a word in common use for Andy Coulsons: impertinent. You can’t use that description any more of course, because everyone thinks they’re pertinent. Useless people with no pertinence in relation to anything of value want to be Prince Charles’s equerry, or sub-arachnoid brain surgeons. But whatever they aspire to, they really are asking for a good duffing up. By the time folks had finished working Coulson over, he’d want total facial plastic surgery to escape future drubbings. He’d probably need it, too.

Hugo Swire is another one. The Swires and the Camerons holiday together. God help us: going on holiday with Hugo Swire. I can talk for Devon on the subject of Swire, because for a tantalisingly brief time, he was my MP. So useless was he in helping rescue half the constituency from the menaces of a mad fraudster, I appealed in the end to Oliver Letwin in the next-door constituency. Mr Letwin was placed in an impossible position, but achieved more under the radar in a week than Swire had managed in a year.

Boundary changes then moved Swire elsewhere, but the real reason may well have been that he was in such grave danger of a mass pummelling, Central Office had to move this self-satisfied man for his own safety.

I mean, look at him. The sort of face that makes you want to legalise toff-bating, it promises a smug manner of superiority perfectly designed to cause an outbreak of foot on mouth disease. Uuuuurgh.

Thinking of schooldays again, there were always two fat kids. One was bullied (probably by Hugo Swire, I’d imagine) and the other one never got bullied because he was The Chief. He wasn’t fat, he was Fats. Nobody messed with Fats. Unsurprisingly, David Cameron has one of these too, the extensively named Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith – the 2nd Baron of Strathclyde for short, or Lord Fatsclyde for very short.

Lord Fatsclyde

Man is he ever fat. He’s so fat, they built a University out of him and still had all these bits left. He’s so fat, my Microsoft picture manager could only just compress him. And the beauty of libel laws for the politically incorrect is that Fatsclyde can’t do anything about any of this: he is so quite astonishingly, morbidly obese, you could call him a dirigible and get away with it. But I would never do that.
Lord Strathclyde is in fact one of Dave’s very closest friends. He is the PM’s chief ‘fixer’ in the House of Lords: as soon as  Cameron won the Tory leadership election, Fats was made Leader of the House of Lords and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in charge of royal estates. After Cammers formed the ConDem Coalition, the peer became a Minister, while remaining Leader of the Lords. So his full title now is:
The Right Honourable Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith, 2nd Baron of Strathclyde, Leader of the House of Lords and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in charge of royal estates.

Do you want to plant one on him? I do. You would too if you knew more about him; but don’t worry, because I’m about to brief you. Lord S is the sort of chap who doesn’t like a public footpath anywhere near his tennis court, so he arranges to get the path moved – the Mirror reports. He is one of those ‘accused of ‘disgraceful extravagance’ for spending £500,000 on art for the Palace of Westminster while the country languishes in recession’ – alleges the Mail. And he is a sex cheat who committed adultery with Birgit Cunningham – ‘ I feel used says single mum Birgit’ – reports pretty well everyone, so I might as well too.

Thus, his expenditures, sex life and gargantuan size suggest that Lord Strathclyde is a man of great appetites – and not a chap who’s terribly willing to curb any of them. Perhaps he saw Birgit as a bit of droit de seigneur – who knows? Either way, he sounds like a prime candidate for what Sid James used to call ‘a  right punch up the bracket’.
“We’re all in the same boat together” said George Osborne, but I suspect views would be divided as to whether that was really accurate in the case of Lord Fats. In fact, opinion would be polarised as to whether you’d want him in the boat in the first place. On the one hand, he’d sink anything short of an Onassis-scale yacht. On the other, one could always eat him while waiting for the IMF.
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Andrew Marr once memorably remarked that Margaret Thatcher was “fortunate in her choice of enemies”. The Slog now suggests that the Prime Minister is unfortunate in his choice of friends. But the fact remains that, whereas the Mad Handbag had no choice – she was handed the Galtieri-Scargill win double, and made the best of it – David Cameron has made his own choices. Most of them – including his new fiscal adviser Tim Luke, by the way – are Old Etonians. And most of them seem, well, pretty arrogantly unlikeable.

Bankers will continue to be bashed, as Newscorp phone-hackers will continue to be harried. The old saying – ‘if the cap fits, one must wear it’ – remains as applicable as ever. Except in the case of Lord Strathclyde. In his case, the word would probably be parachute.